Hewlett-Packard printers have suddenly started rejecting ink cartridges produced or refilled by third parties, apparently due to a “ticking timebomb” left by the manufacturer in an update released in March 2016.

The printers, in the company’s OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro and OfficeJet Pro X ranges, accepted refills made by third-parties and sold at a significantly lower price than the official ink made and sold by HP itself. But on 13 September, the printers began to reject those refills, with error messages including “cartridge problem”, “one or more cartridges are missing or damaged” and “older generation cartridge”.

Adding insult to injury, the printers themselves have not received a software update recently, suggesting that the last update, six months ago, had a delayed-action effect. In doing so, it prevented affected users from getting the word out about the lockdown and discouraging others in a similar situation from updating their own printers.

Printer cartridges have long been more than dumb receptacles for ink, and these days they contain a multitude of software and hardware components designed to report their status to the printer, improve print quality, and prevent mistakes from occurring. But as a convenient side effect for the manufacturers, those features also make it a lot harder for third parties to refill or replace printer ink: a refilled cartridge, for instance, might incorrectly report that it’s still empty, while a manufactured replacement may lack the crucial software code that convinces the printer it’s safe to use.

In a statement to the BBC, HP said that some cartridges would still work: “These printers will continue to work with refilled or remanufactured cartridges with an original HP security chip. Other cartridges may not function.”

“In many cases, this functionality was installed in the HP printer and in some cases it has been implemented as part of an update to the printer’s firmware,” it added.

But history repeats itself: Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow pointed out the similarity between HP’s “ticking timebomb” and one installed in Lexmark printers over a decade ago. “In 2003, Lexmark (then an IBM division) sued Static Controls, saying that the company had violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by reverse-engineering its toner cartridges and refilling old ones that could successfully pass Lexmark’s checks for valid, full cartridges.

“Lexmark had an ‘I am empty’ bit in their cartridges; when the cartridge ran out of toner, the bit flipped to ‘true.’ Even if you refilled your cartridge, your printer wouldn’t use it, because it saw the cartridge as empty. Static Controls figured out how to flip that bit back to ‘false.’” But, Doctorow adds, Lexmark lost.